Just in time for Valentine’s Day: a French drama from an Iranian director about divorce and
bitter feelings.

Pass the chocolates.

Actually,
The Past will be welcomed by filmgoers who saw
A Separation, the work of director Asghar Farhadi that two years ago won the Oscar for
best foreign-language film.

Like that intense, absorbing drama of a marriage coming apart despite everyone’s best
intentions,
The Past chronicles the pain and anger that boil over among adults and children whose
lives have become hopelessly tangled.

The film slowly explains its characters’ connections by dropping the viewer into the middle of
their lives. An Iranian man, Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa), has traveled from Tehran to a large city in
France where he is met at the airport by a Frenchwoman named Marie (Berenice Bejo). They smile but
don’t hug.

We learn that they are married but have been separated for four years. Ahmad has come to sign
divorce papers and reluctantly agrees to stay in Marie’s home, which she shares with her two
daughters from a previous relationship and the young son of her live-in boyfriend, Samir (Tahar
Rahim).

If that isn’t sufficiently sticky, Marie’s elder daughter, the teenage Lucie (Pauline Burlet),
is going through a defiant streak. And Samir has a wife who has been in a coma for several
months.

The Past evolves into a drama about resentful people acting out to hide what they feel. As
the title implies, events in the past are damaging the present.

Ahmad proves himself a reasonable man who tries hard to help but might make matters worse, and
Marie keeps exploding into wrathful outbursts against the children when they aren’t the real source
of her pain.

The absorbing film takes an ill-advised turn into melodrama in the final section and piles one
improbable twist on another until the core of the domestic drama has been turned into an imitation
of a criminal investigation.

That’s a shame because Farhadi has an evident talent for mining the raw emotions of
relationships gone sour. His new work didn’t need all the excessive plotting he adds in the
homestretch.

Still, most of
The Past is worth seeing for its realistic portrayal of the agonies people put one another
through.